Scott Martelle

5839. 1932 FDR, Hoover, and the Dawn of a New America, by Scott Martelle (read 28 Mar 2024) This is a very sprightly book which tells well of the extraordinary year 1932, a year a bit before I became aware of politics. It is a year which I would have dreaded and much worried about if I had been a little older. I know my parents must have worried much, but maybe they felt they would be ok and that God would provide. even though they had 8 children aged 17, to 1. Just reading of the fearsome time scared me. It is indeed a memorable book.… (meer)

Growing up in Detroit I would occasionally hear some fact or other, there was a race riot in Detroit in 1943, there was a mayor of Detroit in the 20's or 30's whose party was the Ku Klux Klan, that Henry Ford openly distributed copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc., but if I looked at any of the histories of the city available to me (I have one in front of me written by someone at Ford Motor Co.) there is no mention of these things. Scott Martelle's book doesn't just mention these things, that is what it is about. As terrible as the history of Detroit is, the book is a pleasure to read. There are many insightful comments, e.g that there is no Ford or Chrysler University, and a bigger portrait is painted of many interesting Detroiters, e.g. Coleman Young, than I have seen elsewhere. Others have complained that the book is written with a liberal point of view, and that is certainly true, but a bigger falsehood would be to ignore it all, as most white suburbanite accounts do. The book is relatively short and Detroit is, or was, a big city with a long history, so many things go unmentioned or only touched on. Did Mayor Cavanaugh have ties to the Mafia? What was the nature and extent of Union corruption? What was the extent of police department corruption in the last 50 years? What role did the big three play in the absence of public transportation in the modern city?
This book would be much better if it had some historically appropriate maps in it. In fact I think you could take the illustrations from a crappier history of the city and insert them with happy consequences.… (meer)

I learned some early history of Detroit from this book. Unfortunately, the tone of the book was heavily biased and overtly blamed racism for all the ills of the city and the author seemed able to conjecture intent when no one else has been able to do so. The theme was definitely racism and the author tried to plant that as an evil in Detroit's history as early as the beginning of 1800 - not sure how he could do that without substantiation. He only glossed over Coleman Young and only mentioned Kwame Kilpatrick in one sentence without referring to all his associated scandals.… (meer)